One or more aspects of the invention relate generally to a distributed system to improve XML communication. Further, one or more aspects of the invention relate to a method for performing a communication in a distributed system to improve XML communication, a data processing program, and a computer program product.
Modern communication protocols between computer systems, e.g., a server and a client, often rely on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as the standard vehicle to code data to be transmitted from one system to another. Thereby, a client application, running on a client computer, serializes a given client application data model into XML. Typically, a standard API (Application Programming Interface) providing a de-serialization function may be used on the client-side to perform such a data transformation.
The serialized XML data may then be sent over a network to a server application running on the server. This server environment receives the serialized XML data and writes it to an input buffer. Here, the XML data may be parsed and de-serialized into an output buffer format. Further processing by the server application may be performed using the data in the output buffer format.
However, the de-serialization of the data received from the client and the required transformation into the output buffer format for further processing on the server-side requires server computing resources.
A couple of documents focus on XML data communication.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,441,185 B2, incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses a method for processing XML documents in a computer-based system. The method includes associating each of a plurality of information items with a corresponding one of a plurality of binary-data units and providing an XML document associated with an XML information set comprising one or more of the plurality of information items. The method includes also serializing the XML document into a binary XML format, or de-serializing the XML document from the binary XML format.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,136,109 B1, incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, describes a method for delivering data and formatting information including delivering object definition files from a server to a client. The method comprises generating definitions and object instantiations at the client using JavaScript or another simple browser-interpreted language for objects relating to data modeling and presentation.
However, known functions callable through XML APIs generate XML formatted data for the communication from the client to the server which in turn may require a compute-intensive de-serialization and transformation into a server-side processing data format.